Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (32 page)

"irresolution," the text will very quickly cease to be interesting enough to bother with. Cp. Polzin,
Moses and the Deuteronomist
. See also Steinberg, who writes, "James's
The Turn of the Screw
, Gogol's "The Overcoat," Agnon's ''Another Face": these multiple systems of gapfilling sufficiently differ from one another (and from our paradigmatic case, the David and Bathsheba story) to give an idea of the scope and implications of this principle. One could easily multiply examples from all literary genres—epic, novel, drama, poetry. The endless critical warfare about their interpretation misses (as well as, unwittingly, establishes) the poetic

point.
And so do the attempts to resolve the quarrel by blaming the work itself: the incoherencies that derive flora its history of transmission—the staple of biblical source criticism—or from its sloppy execution or even from its disregard for clarity. It ia not that any of these explanations of incoherence may be ruled out a priori, but that their abuse obscures the scope and working of ambiguity as a constructive force.'' Poetics
, p. 227 (emphasis mine).

1. Tony Bennet,
   Formalism and Marxism
   (London, 1979), p. 146.
   

2. This is
   not
   to deny, of course, their historicity, nor even the possibility (probability) that the historical tannaim actually held the views ascribed to them, but only to interpret the textualization of these views by the author of the Mekilta.
   

3. For examples of sharply bifurcated interpretive traditions of such works see Barbara Johnson's by now classic reading of the hermeneutic tradition on
   Billy Budd
   , in her
   The Critical Difference
   (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 79–110, and Sternberg's discussion of
   The Turn of the Screw in Poetics
   , pp. 222ff. Both of these critics show that the bifurcation of the interpretive tradition is a function of difference and dialectic within the text itself. this is not to deny the ideological dimension of all reading, of course, but merely to oppose a reduction of interpretation to the subjective ideologies of readers. For a review of traditional Jewish commentary on another of the murmuring stories, see Nehama Leibowitz,
   Studies in Exodus
   , [Hebrew], (Jerusalem, nd), pp. 200–212. Again the commentators split between those who explain that the request was justified and necessarily reduce the pejorative connotations of the text and those who understand that there was no real need, but an unjustified rebellion, and explain away the thirst as lack of faith.
   

4. Nonetheless, there is an aspect of these readings that seemingly cannot be suppressed or accounted for from within the text which is being read and its "warring forces of signification." I am referring, of course, to R. El'azar's insistent connection of every verse to the "merit of the ancestors." Admittedly, he is reading the whole story as a case of God's relenting and not punishing an undeserving and ingrate people, and the merit of the ancestors provides as it were an explanation of His motivations, but surely there were other choices of motivation available to R. El'azar (e.g., the intercession of Moses). Why did he choose, therefore, always to emphasize this one motivation, if not to make some Point beyond exegesis? This suggests once again that Rabbi El'azar indeed had some ulterior motive, some ideological ax to grind in his insistence on the merit of the ancestors here. It may be so, and we may never be able to prove it one way or the other, but this does not seem to me in any way to undermine my insistence that the primary motivation for the dialogue of these readings arises in the dialogue within the text itself. Cf. Urbach,
   The Sages
   , pp. 497ff.
   

5. Geoffrey Hartman,
   Criticism in the Wilderness
   (New Haven, 1980), p. 32.
   

6. I am indebted to Prof. Steven Katz for this insight.
   

7. Steinberg,
   Poetics
   , p. 228.
   

8. Harold Bloom,
   A Map of Misreading
   (Oxford, 1975), p. 76, (emphasis original).
   

1. David Flusser, "The Parables of Jesus and the Parables in Rabbinic Literature," in his
   Jewish Sources in Early Christianity
   [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1979), pp. 150– 210.
   

2. Susan Wittig, "Meaning and Modes of Signification" in Daniel Patte, ed.,
   Semiology and Parables
   (Pittsburgh, 1976), pp. 319–347. 3. Ibid., p. 323.
   

4. Ibid., p. 324.

5. Ibid., p. 334.

6. Ibid., p. 335.

7. Ibid., p. 336.

1. See the discussion of her paper in
   Semiology and Parables
   , pp. 348–384.
   

2. Also drawn from my new translation of the Mekilta, this text has been completely corrupted in current editions, both vulgate and critical, and may only be restored by recourse to the oldest manuscripts.
   

3. Childs, p. 220.
   

4. See below and especially, chapter 6.
   

5. The word for "handles" and the word "proved" come from the same root in Hebrew. "Handles" is being used in a sense very similar to that of the modem English colloquial phrase, ''I can't get a handle on that idea," i.e., a place of access. Cf. Bruns ''Midrash and Allegory."
   

6. Song of Songs Rabba
   , p. 5.
   

7. That is to say, the Bible explicitly or implicitly ascribes these three works to Solomon;
   

   it was the rabbis who explained that the first was written in his youth, the second in his maturity, and the third in his old age, thus providing a sort of typology of the three ages of man.
   

8. Compare the following use of this term from the same midrash: " 'Your eyes are doves,'—like doves, your figure [
   dugma
   ] is similar to a dove" (
   Song of Songs Rabba
   , p. 100.
   Dugma
   is accordingly practically an etymological equivalent of
   figura
   .
   

9. Compare David Stern, "Rhetoric and Midrash: The Case of the Mashal,"
   Prooftexts
   1 (1981), pp. 261–291.
   

10. Frank Kermode,
    The Genesis of Secrecy
    (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 77. The term "ado" is cited by Kermode from Henry James.
    

11. Ibid., p. 81. Kermode is obviously
    not
    using the term "fibula" in the formalist sense of the sequence of events abstracted from the text in opposition to the
    sjuzhet
    , the discourse, but rather in the original Latin sense. Kermode even calls this process
    midrash
    , mistakenly in my view. He is closer to midrash when he speaks on p. 82 of collections of "Old Testament" testimonia about the messiah underlying the Gospel stories.
    

19. Ibid., p. 85. 20. Ibid., p. 339.

21. White,
Tropics of Discourse
, p. 58.

1. The Hebrew term here is
   rashum
   , which has been itself interpreted to mean mashal, a meaning which would not be altogether unwelcome here. See, however, chapter 4 n. 7 above.
   

2. White, p. 59.
   

3. Yet another image for the hermetic Torah, now that which was possessed but is lost.
   

4. I.e., the Song of Songs
   

5. Hence, the analogy between Solomon and the rabbis. Solomon is a sort of protorabbi for the midrash.
   

6. The order deviates from both the chronological and canonical ones because this passage is an introduction to the midrash on Song of Songs and its author wishes therefore to end his discourse mentioning that book.
   

7. See David Stem, "Rhetoric and Midrash."
   

8. Kermode,
   Genesis of Secrecy
   , pp. 98–99.
   

9. "It is at least convenient to think of the methodologically describable
   fabula
   as having historical existence" (Ibid., p. 79).
   

10. Steinberg, p. 31. for Kermode on this question see
    Genesis of Secrecy
    , pp. 101–125.
    

11. His most explicit investigation of this issue is the chapter on Droysen in
    The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
    

    (Baltimore, 1986).
    

12. Louis Matin, "On the Interpretation of Ordinary Language: A Parable of Pascal," in
    Textual Strategies
    , ed. Josue v. Harari (Ithaca, 1979), p. 245, (emphasis mine).
    

13. The point I am making is not that only the rabbinic or Solomonic interpretation could make the Torah intelligible, but rather that the text, prior to some kind of ideological structuring and reading, is always, as it were, a closed book. The rabbinic statement is to be considered paradigmatic of the condition of reading of all serious fictional (meaningcarrying) texts.
    

14. Marin, p. 246.
    

15. D. Stern's paper, "Midrash and Indeterminacy," represents a somewhat different approach to the problem of how midrashic interpretation is constrained. See also Goldin, "The Freedom and Restraint of Haggadah."
    

16. By the term "rabbinic" here, I mean that which belongs to the period of the rabbis. It is precisely my point that the mashal is not an erudite or elite structure, but one that was available to anyone competent in the culture.
    

1. Sigmund Freud,
   Moses and Monotheism
   (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 283–4, quoted in Christopher M. Johnson, "Intertextuality and the Psychical Model,"
   

   Paragraph
   11 (1988), pp. 72–73.
   

2. See, for the nonce, my "Voices in the Text,"
   Revue Biblique
   , October, 1986, pp. 581–598.
   

1. See the classic discussion of this matter by Saul Lieberman, "Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture," in his
   Hellenism in Jewish Palestine
   (New York, 1950), pp. 70–78.
   

2. See also Geoffrey Hartman, "The Struggle for the Text," in Hartman and Budick, pp. 3–18, and esp. p. 11 for a similar perspective and a very powerful reading of the story of Jacob and the angel.
   

3. Samuel Loewenstamm,
   The Tradition of the Exodus in its Development
   [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1987), p. 116. Cassuto makes a somewhat similar argument. After arguing that there was an ancient Israelite epic of the battle between God and the sea and that it was lost at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah owing to theological antagonism, he writes:
   

   It was, in truth, lost, but not entirely. The basic story it related, which was widely known among the people, was not completely forgotten. The poetic version was no longer extant, but the knowledge of its content did not become extinct. This tradition continued to live in the people's memory, and was given renewed literary expression in rabbinic teaching. The fears that aroused the antagonism of the Torah to legends of this nature, no longer existed in the days of the Talmudic Rabbis, since the danger of idolatry had then already passed. Hence the Sages did not refrain from incorporating the accepted folk tradition in their treasury of legend. ("The Israelite Epic," in his
   Biblical and Oriental Studies
   (Jerusalem, 1975), vol. 2, p. 102.)
   

   Cassuto deserves every credit for having discovered the fragments of the "Israelite Epic" in the biblical text, but his claim that the material was actually preserved in the folk tradition until rabbinic times seems both naive and unnecessary to me. Loewenstamm's advance over Cassuto's original formulation with regard to the midrash is in his perception that the rabbis could have indeed reconstructed and revived the mythical material from their close reading of the Bible itself. What I am trying to do here which goes beyond both of them is inscribe this particular instance in a theory of cultural dynamics in which repression and the return of the repressed manifested in the intertextuality of all literature is emblematic of culture in general enabling a dialectic of cultural history.
   

4. Lauterbach, I, p. 229.
   

5. For these two exegetical possibilities see literature cited in Meir Weiss,
   The Bible from Within
   (Jerusalem, 1984), pp. 369–370.
   

6. See Childs, pp. 220–221. See also Martin Noth,
   Exodus: A Commentary
   (Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 114–116.
   

7. Cf. Loewenstamm, p. 118.
   

8. Midrashic reading is, in this sense, congruent with contemporary reading practices. The classic statement on this issue is now Meir Sternberg's chapter entitled, "Gaps, Ambiguities, and the Reading Process," in his
   Poetics
   , pp. 186–229. See also the excellent discussion of this issue in Robert Polzin, p. 17.
   

9. It is certainly significant that on verse 14:27 cited above, in which there is no narrative gap, the Mekilta explicitly comments: "The sea will not resist you."
   

10. Murray Krieger, "Poetic Presence and Illusion,"
    Critical Inquiry
    5 (1979), pp. 601–602. For the sources of Krieger's definition of "prosopopeia," see Jon Whitman,
    Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique
    (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), p. 269.
    

1. Whitman, p. 272.
   

2. Cf. Weiss, p. 368: "The events that transpired hundreds of years before your psalmist's time have become, through his description, as though they were vivid events occurring before his very eyes. There are no more boundaries either in time or in space. The psalmist stands face to face with the sea and Jordan, the mountains and hills, and he can turn to them and ask them: What ails you. . . ." It is, in fact, precisely this sense of no boundaries of time or space in the lyric voice that enables
   

   the rabbis to project this voice onto Moses himself at the actual events.
   

3. Cf. Weiss, p. 362.
   

4. This reading is, to be sure, not the only one that could be adopted here. There is always, at least in theory, the possibility that this story is not meant seriously in a referential way but as a sort of parable or allegory for a more abstract issue. That is certainly the way many scholars and traditional commentators on midrash would read it. The sea's speech would be then only a figure of speech. I cannot disprove such an approach—only say that it seems to go against the tenor of the text as I perceive it. I can perhaps strengthen my claim somewhat by the following reasoning. The rabbis generally make a distinction between mashal (parable) and "reality," true stories in the sense of narrative of events that have actually taken place. The following text shows this opposition clearly:
   

   R. Eliezer says: The dead whom Ezekiel raised stood on their feet, uttered a song and died. What song did they utter? God kills justly and resurrects mercifully. R. Yehoshua says: They uttered this song: God kills and resurrects, takes down to Sheol and will raise up [1 Samuel 2:6].
   R. Yehuda says: In reality it was a mashal. R. Nehemiah said to him: If a mashal then why "in reality," and if "in reality," then why a mashal?! But, indeed, he meant that it was redly a mashal
   . R. El'azar the son of R. Yosi Hagelili says: The dead whom Ezekiel raised went up to the land of Israel, took wives and begat sons and daughters. R. Yehuda ben Beteira stood on his feet and said: I am one of their grandchildren, and these are the phylacteries which my grandfather left to me from them. [Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 92 b]
   

   This text sharply contrasts mashal with "reality," which must mean then that which has taken physical place in the real world, both in R. Nehemiah's astonishment at
   

   R. Yehuda's "inconsistency" and in the way that R. Yehuda's statement is contested by strong counterclaims about the literal referentiality of Ezekiel's narrative. Clearly, then, for the rabbis there is a semantic, cultural opposition between the mashal, which is fiction, and historical reality. Now, our text includes a mashal, and the story of the sea and Moses is the
   designatum
   of that very mashal. If the mashal is interpretive fiction, then presumably (although not ineluctably) its object (the other of the mashal) is making claims to be "in reality." Finally, I would think that if our text were a philosophical or theological allegory, it would thematize its theological issues more explicitly. As we well know, virtually any text
   can
   be given an allegorical reading. To my taste there is nothing in
   this
   text that calls for or authorizes such a practice, although other readers, I am sure, will continue to maintain precisely that. What I am certain of is that this is not meant as a mere playful or entertaining tale;
   

   its cultural weight is too great for that.
   

5. See Cassuto,
   Studies
   , pp. 80–102.
   

6. For the forms of the repression of mythological reality in the Bible see the excel